You may have thought that Sultan’s phenomenal success story had already had its last chapter.

After all, the film had already broken records like making the fastest Rs 200 crore in box office collections worldwide; it had a pretty good opening (between Rs 34-36 crore on its first day alone) and raced to join the ‘100-crore club’ within three days of being released.

Even as its star — Salman Khan — was acquitted in the black buck poaching case on Monday, 25 July, Sultan was busy rushing to reach the Rs 550 cr mark in box office collections worldwide.

In fact, Salman’s fans too to Twitter to make the hashtag “Sultan 500cr worldwide” trend.

Just how close is Salman’s film to touching the 550-crore mark?

An International Business Times report states that Sultan’s current worldwide box office earnings stand at Rs 547 crore. With this feat, it has also surpassed the previous best set by Aamir Khan’s Dhoom 3, which had collected Rs 542 crore in worldwide ticket sales.

However, Sultan is still far from beating the lifetime collections (worldwide) of SS Rajamouli’s epic Baahubali, which minted nothing short of Rs 582+ crores.

Sultan’s box office run has been propelled not only by the star power of Salman Khan, but also the fact that it has had nearly no competition in over three consecutive weeks at the box office. After its five day holiday opening (due to Eid) the subsequent weeks have only seen the releases of considerably lower profile films like Great Grand Masti and Irrfan Khan’s Madaari.

Rajinikanth’s Kabali, while doing better than Sultan in its opening week, is not targeted at Hindi film watchers, which is Salman’s core audience.